Syrian genocide

SIR – In 1943, after the loss of 49 members of his family to the Holocaust, and heavily influenced by the atrocities suffered by the Armenians, Raphael Lemkin coined the term “genocide”. He died exhausted and gaunt in 1959, having dedicated his life, with ferocious energy, to building international legal structures to prevent genocide from ever happening again.

I cannot help wondering what Lemkin would have made of the resignation of Carla Del Ponte, who quit the United Nations Commission of Inquiry into human rights abuses in Syria, citing a “lack of political will” and criticising the UN Security Council – which, in her words, does “not want justice” (report, July 8).

This follows years of inertia from the international community in the face of crimes so cruel that Ms Del Ponte said she had never before seen their like, even in Rwanda. Again the International Criminal Court has been exposed as toothless and the Genocide Convention mere ink and paper.

Britain has an opportunity to lead the reform of these institutions, whose credibility could not be at a lower ebb, for the sake of those ethnic and religious groups who face being wiped from the map.

Carla Del Ponte will have her critics, but she should take comfort in Lemkin’s famous exhortation: “If you act in the name of conscience you are stronger than any government.” Lord Alton

London SW1